The Things You Said Would Break Me
by LuteLyre
Summary: Work for it. Dance like a hooked fish. Beg me like a stray dog.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I'm back! Just in time to start procrastinating studying for my final exams, with a new fic, too, yet another multi-chapter and multi-pairing. Wow, I'm really branching out. Enjoy!

Pairings: Genma/Ino, Ino/Sakura, Kakashi/Genma  
Warnings: 18+ only. Mature themes. explicit sexual situations. BDSM references, forced prostitution, self-harm, drug-use, torture reference, emotional and physical abuse references, psychological suffering

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, or make money from this.

The Things You Said Would Break Me

_Work for it girl. Dance like a hooked fish. Beg me like a stray dog._

X

The smell was the worst-Ino had long ago decided this. The smell-crusty unwashed sheets, the burned butter stink of sticky body fluids, tired sweat and pointless spit.

That dirty-money-note smell, bills so creased the etched ink numbers have almost faded away.

Ino's client rolls off of her with a grunt like a hippo, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull up his underwear.

She considers the heavy scar tissue-meatily textured-that is seared along his spinal cord, with detached interest. The scar curls up over the round curve of his bald head. he must've taken an acid splash for someone with that wound; medically the pattern is not something you'd get otherwise.

From what she's recon she's gathered, Ino knows he's a high ranking bodyguard for one of the heads of the Yamada drug syndicate in Amegakure, this pit of a village where she's been existing for the past nine months.

It's funny how he's self-sacrificing and noble enough to shield someone else from the horrid injury of acid burn, to take on such disfigurement, but he liked to choke the sluts he bought sex from.

He'd dug in his nails too, Ino had noticed, and it had nearly drawn blood.

She'd get extra money for that though, she supposes. Scar-skull doesn't look at her as he slaps the fee down on her dresser. Ino imagines that she can inhale the stink from the banknotes from where she lies with her legs spread open on the bed.

The cheap lilac lingerie she's wearing has ripped again, and this time it'll be harder to hide the mend. She'll have to buy more.

How many months has it been?

The first time her lace ripped, Ino can remember the way her hands trembled, the way her fingers shook so hard she could hardly hold a cup of sake to her lips. Now, there is nothing except a dull numbness, spreading down the back of her neck. Ino thinks that perhaps everything has finally started to blur together.

She wonders if she should feel good about that.

The door shuts with a unobtrusive click behind her client, and Ino pulls the soiled sheets up to her neck and closes her eyes.

X

_-Sakura had liked Ino in lilac lace. She used to run her lips delicately over the curve of the frills on Ino's chest, her mouth wet. _

"_Your skin...Ino..." Sakura nuzzles her head into Ino's neck, affectionate murmurings vibrating softly into the hollow of Ino's throat. "Creamy..."_

_Her eyes are like fresh-cut grass. Ino laughs, slips her slim fingers under Sakura's milk-soft knee and squeezes. Sakura's answering giggle echos like a patter of rain lining the grey clouds drifting through Ino's memory; heavy, warm, and mild.-_

X

Genma has warm, honey-coloured eyes, but when he slips in through her bedroom window in the dead of night later that week, his gaze becomes guarded and professional, hard like crystallized amber.

"You didn't check in for debriefing yesterday."

Ino always wondered how Genma manages to survive like this. He stands at the foot of her bed, sleek and cold in rain-slicked ANBU stealth gear, like a shadow wraith. His eyes are glinting through his mask.

Ino can't wear her mask for this mission, obviously. Sometimes this used to bother her, but she thinks by now she has become skilled enough at wearing different faces on her skin. She doesn't really need porcelain anymore.

Genma is there walking and talking and breathing in front of her like it was nothing, like he is completely unaffected, the perfect soldier.

It's just not really fair, because Ino knows that Genma had to do what Ino's doing now a hundred times over. They don't give Eros agents handlers who are innocent, green like spring grass. Genma is ANBU. He knows this life.

It's not fair that he stands so solidly over her, his gaze upon her body beneath the blankets so aggressively neutral it is almost a judgment in and of itself. His achingly professional scrutiny used to make her angry, but now Ino just wishes she knew how he did it.

(Maybe it's in the way he fucks her, instead, sometimes. It's in that gasp of his breathing when she arches her back. It occurs to Ino occasionally that perhaps Genma just doesn't cope at all.)

He is still watching her. She hasn't changed out of the ripped lingerie, and Genma has made a note of that now, mentally filing away her act of barely moving from her disgustingly ripe bed to scribble in a psychological evaluation report later. Ino can hardly stop from scoffing at the idea of Genma filling out someone's psych evals. It's not that he's unprofessional- he is so professional it hurts-but she finds it laughable all the same.

His voice is brisk. "You'll need to get it fixed."

"Of course."

Genma cocks his head at her, eyes flashing sharply sideways under his lashes in such a deceptively casual way.

"Did the target adhere to procedure?"

"He shot his load all over my damn thighs, so I guess so, huh?"

Genma turns slightly so that he's not facing her, looks at her without directly looking at her. She has to remind herself they are trained for that. They are trained for everything.

"Safeword, Yamanaka?"

Ino snaps her posture straight, closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose. This is not her life. This is a mission.

"Safeword. Clover."

X

Ino can still dimly remember when she was young, when she had baby-round cheeks her mother used to pat with white hands that smelled of dew-water and newly clipped flowers.

_-"Ino-baby has such chubby cheeks!" A hand, light and soft, patting her face briskly. "Who has the cherub cheeks, my love?" Ino sucks air into her mouth, balloons her cheeks and squints her eyes into a smile, dancing around in her seat at the high, petal-strewn table._

_Her mother is a vague figure above her, only downy piles of yellow-cloud hair and a long, pale neck. "Of course! It's you, darling!"_

_Ino squeals with laughter, spewing a shrill spfffttt of air from her clenched lips, and Ino's mother giggles and presses a velvety clover leaf against her daughters mouth. "You're like a kettle about to spout. How about we make some clover tea sweetling, how about that?"-_

Ino hates clover tea, but sometimes things aren't about taste.

X

Genma, still standing at the foot of the bed, has given her a minute. Now he dares to look at her directly, his eyes careful. Ino stutters for breath, about to cry.

Ino hates Genma a little bit, but in his own fucked up way she knows he is trying to help. Ino got this mission fair and square, after all.

They were so close to breaking into the drug-runners inner syndicate. Not too much longer now. Not too much longer.

Ino swallows, brings her hands over her face and struggles to control breathing that is starting to choke itself on a sob, cursing herself for crying in front of Genma, _again_. She wouldn't break down.

She had promised herself when Sakura slammed the door in her face six months ago that she would not break down.

Genma comes closer, ever so slowly. His hand on her shoulder is cautiously gentle.

"Ino...do you need something?"

It's the honey-darkness in Genma's eyes that makes her say yes. It always is.

X

Genma is too stiff in the beginning, because he always is. His movements are so mechanical, adhering to handler procedure with single minded dedication as he bundles her into his arms, lifts her carefully from the bed, and spreads her out wide over the floor.

Ino rolls onto her stomach because she doesn't want to face how much she needs this. The floor under her belly is shockingly cold and she hiccups through tears that haven't fallen yet, not yet.

Genma's breath is warm against her ear, warm down the line of her spine, warm and wet and soothing. "You should not be ashamed, Ino."

She never understood why she had been paired with Genma. Genma has too much history with this job, and she doesn't have enough. It didn't really make for a healthy partnership.

Genma's hands slide down her back and Ino shudders, hating herself for the way she arches and sighs breathily, right on cue. It's an ingrained response at this point, an auto-pilot action that's two parts seductive and one part devastating, just like she'd been taught.

Genma's hands stop moving. Instead, he leans forward and kisses her cheek. "Not like that love, not now."

Ino gasps like there is glass breaking in her lungs-too much at once.

Genma flips her over firmly, like he knows every secret clinging to the dark crevices in her heart, like he knows how to make her scream.

(There is always that moment of shocking clarity that comes when he does make her scream, and it's happened in so many different ways Ino can't actually remember if he has tortured her or not.)

He gathers her ripped lingerie in his fists and tugs it off over her head, slips from his ANBU gear like peeling a second skin. When they do this, she is not the only one who is exposed. She sighs from the bottoms of her feet, opens her eyes, feels somehow luminous.

Genma is heavy over her, kissing his way down the moon-cave of her ribs with a professional precision that is starting to shake, just ever so slightly. This is always how it goes; every time they do this, Ino shudders back into focus and Genma lets himself fade into a blurred smear, mouth dripping and hands warming and eyes hot like honeyed embers.

X

He fucks her. It is so different from how Ino feels when she smiles with devilish sweetness to her clients on the street, so different and so much the same that it hurts, hurts deep, deep down. It breaks her back together.

Genma laps at her skin like it's a sacred blessing, and it hurts. He presses into her-heat so steady and slow-burning she will taste him in her mouth and on her hands for days after-so simultaneously focused and unfocused, both achingly present here with her in this moment, grounding her into this moments crisp reality, and somehow a hundred miles away, in his own mind, in his own world.

Genma often remembers things he'd rather forget.

Ino remembers things too, when his fingers ghost down her chest, or gasp her hip in a tight and unforgiving grip. When his teeth bite that one certain place on the small of her back she arches like a taut bow, her breath ragged and broken-helpless like it never is with her clients, not once.

Not even when the sick bastards turn the tables on her, faces smug and drunk with a cloyingly thick confidence because she is theirs for that night, she really is. She is subject to the smallest whim, the strangest desire.

She doesn't want to think about their desires.

Ino remembers when Genma was training her, when he taught her how to forge her different faces with so many different faces of his own.

Ino knows she never wants to see some of Genma's faces again. Those faces are not friends, are not handlers, are not for loving. Sometimes they darken the edges of her dewy, nebulous dreams in the night, never fully visible but always present, always watchful.

Oh, but his sweetened eyes burn those faces away now, with careful, painful words whispered to her collarbones and a hot tongue along the shell of her ear.

"That's it, that's it Ino, c'mon, give it to me-ahh, goddamn-you gonna fight it-?" His hands curl under the nape of her neck, slide into dampened roots of her hair and curl, slow and steady as you please.

**Ino is moaning too, she can't stop herself now, she never could before and now isn't really so different, her sighs high and thin and reedy, like a heartbeat that might flatline at any second.**

"Fuck-you can do it darlin', show me we've got this-oh _shit-_-" A twist of their hips and an aching groan pulses the muscles in Genma's jaw, makes Ino glow from within, crackle and snap with fizzing heat along every vein. Teeth, harsh and bleak, scraping along her jaw, searching to suck on her lower lip. "Hah-_yes_-right like that love, show me you're fightin'."

Genma knows how to talk. He can churn sweet patties of new butter out of his words like it's nothing, like his life depends on it, so Ino really shouldn't be listening. But Genma knows what he's doing, he's always known what he's doing; every handler does.

Ino hates crying in front of him, hates it because it happens every time.

When she comes, Genma's cradled along her body and his rough, heady moans vibrate against her throat, under her own tongue. His hair is a sweaty smear on her cheek where her face is tightly buried into the bare expanse of warm, finely scarred skin on his shoulder. He is close, too close, so close that for a moment- for a split second-she knows exactly who she is.

X

Genma is a courteous lover, Ino thinks.

Afterward, he lies with her on the floor because she can't face the gaping target of the bed yet, and she lets him hold her hand while they pass a cigarette back and forth.

(Sakura would sneer and twit at the cigarette, snap it from Ino's lips with quick pink fingers and lecture for an hour, but Ino doesn't think she can think about that yet either. Genma is too stuck in his methods to stop smoking at this point, and Ino just honestly likes it, likes to crush the filter on her teeth.)

Genma remembers his training, when they fuck. He blurs and smears like a globule of paint much too watered down, spotty color dripping from the brush, but Genma remembers she is the one he needs to steady, supposed to keep in at least usable condition.

Ino is slightly more clear now, the haziness lifted for a brief time, with Genma's fingers curled into her own. She looks at the way his eyes are half-closed in the faint, hopeless half-light of dawn, the sunken and stark hollows of his cheeks, and wonders what it would be like to see Genma unleashed.

X

When Ino wakes up the next morning and he is still lying beside her on the now cheaply laundered sheets, she knows he must be more worried about her than he lets on.

The thought twists her stomach into knots.

ooo

Hatake Kakashi has completed certain missions in his brief, violent life-time that make Genma sick to his stomach at the thought of them. He's spilled blood that will stay crusted beneath those white half-moon fingertips forever.

Genma knows that it's all fucked Kakashi up pretty bad, to be honest.

Sometimes Kakashi grips Genma's throat when they fuck. He sometimes slaps a hand over Genma's eyes, whispers that no one can see him when he screws his own slut, no one can see him. When he covers his face in his hands and sits on the edge of the bed without saying anything for hours, Genma knows the scars etched on his skin are burning their way through his mask-and God, the first time Genma had seen the latticework scars over Kakashi's cheekbones, traced the edges of those torn lips, Kakashi had gone so very, very still.

Genma wishes he knew what to do about it, but the problem is Genma is fucked up in his own little ways too.

Sometimes he likes it when Kakashi wires his hands together carelessly above his head and pulls his legs open, when Kakashi's long-fingered hands slip around his neck. He likes it too much.

When Kakashi curls up on his side in their sweaty bed, flinches away from Genma's touch, Genma feels twisted up all the way from the inside out; hot and heavy between his thighs but cold seeping through his ribs.

Kakashi is messed up-but Genma doesn't know how to fix him. When Genma leaves their bed, the dry, cracked sweat on his back feels like self-loathing, feels like guilt.

He hasn't seen Kakashi in a long time.

X

Genma doesn't love being a handler. It's a good job, ANBU wise, and it pays well, but there is something else about it, something that pulls his skin the wrong way, makes him itch.

Genma wakes up raw often now, there is always something bloody in his mouth-he bites his tongue in the night, chokes on his moans and strangles his screams.

When Genma worked full-time eros missions, as agent instead of handler, he'd been the best fuckboy Konoha owned.

Ask him to lie back and think of the village; he could do it. Ask him to seduce and ruin the youngest daughter of Suna's daimyou; he would do it. Order him to work undercover in the dirtiest trafficking rings of Kirigakure, to suck cock for his country, to get down on his knees and beg for it until he cried; he's done all of it, and he could do it again.

That's what being Eros ANBU meant: you sell your body to your Hokage, and hope to the gods they know how to use it for good of the village. For Genma, the top Eros agent Konohagakure could offer, that was supposed to be all there was to it.

Of course, that's not all all there fucking was to it.

Genma still remembers his first high-risk, long-term Eros mission, and the sour taste it leaves in his mouth whenever he thinks of it. He'd infiltrated an embezzling Grass Country ambassador's perverted inner circle for three months, waited on him hand, foot, and ball-gag.

The lord had called him 'pet,' and loved the look of Genma wearing his hair cropped short, short and spiked-bristled like a collared dog.

Genma prefers to simply remember this as the first mission he where took real pleasure out of killing someone, using every intricately poisoned, delicately sharp senbon in his arsenal-just making it long and sweet, making it last.

He wears his hair long now, that's a non-negotiable point, long and tumbling into his eyes, and he tries to never think about why.

Eros agents have to live their lives like that, he explained to himself a long time ago. Eros agents can't think about the 'whys'. Eros agents live in those spaces in between the reasonings.

ooo

Genma has taught Ino this lesson, taught her with harsh senbon slipping under her fingernails and soft, crooning words slipping into her ear. Ino knows an Eros agent survives by only living in their compartmentalized space.

Some of Ino's more wealthy clients like to take her out with them, outside the confines of her rank bed and her stained lingerie where they mutter thoughtless details to her about suppliers and shipments and "_Wouldn't you like to get your hands on my best stuff, huh baby? Get you fuckin' drippin' for my dick with a lil stick of the dope shit."_

(Ino writes a mission report every night on the 'transactions'-and it gets harder and harder to remember that's what they're considered, even legally, because this is Amegakure, this is a mission, this is not her life.

When she inks their words and secrets she glances at the veins on her arm where a few of the drug-runners circle have started shooting her up, just to ensure their moneys worth.

She didn't want to, no she didn't want to in the beginning, but first there were glinting needles and then there were demanding hands, and now she's a good little slut for them.

She's always obedient, in the end, because they are all so very talkative on their drugs, dropping secrets in her ears like dead flies Konoha needs to collect and pin neatly into their little glass show-boxes, that Konoha craves like frothed whipped cream on a hot summer day.

Genma notes the development, dutifully slips her detox and high-resistance pills-for all the good that does-and does regulatory bloodwork every week to keep her from being infected by the slipshod needles.

His thumbs are always carefully impartial on the bruised-black skin inside her arm, and his eyes cooly non-judgmental. He is so cruelly professional when her eyelids flutter slowly closed, or her thighs involuntarily quiver, that Ino wants to slap him.)

The more wealthy clients like to keep her on for show. She is their faux-elegant, platinum-blonde tall drink of water, so shiny to look at and thin as a waif, abundantly perfumed in scents like sickly-sweet lilacs and warm crushed velvet. Ino has discovered she makes for some damn good arm candy.

It's a fact that sharply amuses her, to an extent. A lethal shinobi seen as eye-candy. 'The perfect tool for any situation,' Her father always used to say.

Ino wears her bloodiest lipstick, and smiles pretty.

X

There are girls who kiss other girls at the strip clubs they take her to, kiss and fuck other girls, and Ino couldn't quite manage to look them in the eyes for most of the beginning.

In the beginning, Sakura's mouth was on every face.

Now, in the middle, Ino tries very hard not to think about Sakura at all.

It's almost started to work, too.

Sometimes Sakura's face is dull on her eyelids, almost not there. Like a child's crude and colorful crayon drawing-just a little bit off, not really recognizable, a series of shapes and lines that make up a person, but not quite her person.

When this happens, Ino is scared and angry and elated all at once. She doesn't need the stubborn furrow in Sakura's eyebrows here, she doesn't need the concerned set of her jaw, she doesn't need the gentle curl of her eyelashes. Sakura doesn't have to be here, because Ino is alone here, really alone, and what good would it do, really?

Other girls mouths taste like stale vodka, like warm nights and too many cigarettes, salt and sweat and smeared mascara.

During her clear, weakly hesitant moments, Ino tries to remember what Sakura tastes like.

ooo

End of Part One

A/N: I'm thinking this story will have around 4 parts. Luckily I've already got most of it written, so you shouldn't have to wait too long, dear readers!

I really hope you enjoyed the fic. I am branching out in this story, trying a few new darker themes and angles, so we shall see where it goes!

Note: The summary "work for it girl..." is taken from a spoken word poetry piece I love, "At the Owl" by Olivia Gatwood. Check it out!

For anyone wondering if "Brightness..." will ever be finished, the answer is YES. Just give me time darlings, I need time. My fingers have a mind of their own when they type-as much as I tell them to write some Neji/Naru, they simply beg me to torture Genma and Ino some more. I am still working on it, I promise. :)

Thank you for reading! All feedback and criticism is greatly appreciated! (This means review. Please review! I need help to see where this fic will go.)

-Lute


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Back with part two! Later than I intended, but it needed some serious work. Mirror posted on Ao3. Enjoy!

Pairings: Genma/Ino Genma/Kakashi Ino/Sakura

Warnings: 18+ only. mature themes, explicit sexual situations, drug-use, self-harm, emotional and psychological instability and abuse, occasional dubious consent, forced (mission) prostitution, torture reference, mild bdsm themes.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, or make money from this work.

DUBCON: This chapter specifically contains a NC-17 scene of dubious consent. If this squicks you, please keep this in mind. The scene is not intended to be an assault, but if anything with remotely hazy consent triggers you, you should skip the last bit. :)

The Things You Said Would Break Me

_Work for it girl. Dance like a hooked fish. Beg me like a stray dog._

Part Two:

X

In Konoha, under the shade of green-leafed trees, with days between missions that seemed more like months, evenings stretched long and hazy between the dim pools of streetlights, mornings drenched in weak sunlight, Genma had seen Kakashi often.

(They haven't been in Konoha for a long time, and Genma hasn't seen Kakashi for a long time, but Genma doesn't like to think about how long it's been, because then there's a chance he might have counted the days wrong, and then Kakashi might be late coming back from his mission, might be missing, might even be dead and rotting on some cliffside in Snow Country, ice-flakes dusting his nose.

Genma is still so angry that Kakashi took the stupid fucking mission to godforsaken Snow Country, of all places, but he just can't think about how long it's been.)

In Konoha, Gnema had liked to knock on the door of Kakashi's apartment, rain or shine, with his hands grabby and his hair smelling like sex.

Kakashi never said anything about how Genma fucked other people. He knew-Genma never tried to hide where his mouth had been recently when he kissed Kakashi, often didn't even bother to shower between beds. It almost gave him a thrill-when it comes to Kakashi, he let himself break all his own rules, like dominos toppling themselves over.

Their twisted, almost not-relationship didn't have a name, didn't have rules, didn't even really have limitations-even when perhaps it should have.

Genma treated his silence like it was permission, but the truth of it was Kakashi was really just too fucked up to focus on more than one person at time, simple as that. He couldn't have handled two fuckboys if he'd tried.

When Genma appears on Kakashi's cramped landing and kicks off his shoes without so much as a by-your-leave, his skin still slick from getting his brains fucked out by Raidou, or Aoba, or even Ibiki, his mouth hardly dry from someone else's lips-

Kakashi takes him by his belt loops and pushes him down on his unmade bed, licks someone else's sweat from the underside of Genma's chin, from the smudged bruises over one hipbone, fists a hand in Genma's tangled long hair and yanks his head back, snarling.

X

Kakashi has sharp teeth under that mask, Genma was delighted to find out, canines just a little too toothy to be entirely natural. Genma suspects that the Hatake's bloodline has more in common with dogs than just a summoning contract, but family is one of those things that is on the strictly no-asking list, and Kakashi certainly isn't about to tell.

(Once, Genma had touched the short, weathered case of Kakashi's old family-crested katana, admiring how it's really still in surprisingly good condition, even after all these years of disuse, and the other man hadn't spoken to him for a knows better now.)

Kakashi also has a maw of scars stretching over the left side of his face under that silky shield, a web of thin, silvery scars that look like someone once ran a hair-fine blade ever so lovingly over Kakashi's cheekbones, delicately over his mouth, the clean-cut line of his jaw.

There are so many scars it creates a web that's just a hop, skip and a jump away from checking that little box that says 'maimed' on all the medical file lists, and just a hands-breathed away from 'deformed.'

Genma is no stranger to torture, or to the tales surrounding the copy-nin. He knows how people get scars like that.

Most ninja are casual about their scars- it's a part of the life they live, a virtually guaranteed ticket. Genma himself is neutral towards his own; some of them are bad memories, but all of them are marks of survival, of take-it-like-man, of getting up and getting on.

Usually, Kakashi is just as neutral, even vaguely appreciative. He loves to touch the heavy stripes on Genma's back, and when Genma licks his way over the faint brands on Kakashi's hands, he never fails to shudder, his slightly crooked mouth falling open, eyelids fluttering shut.

But the scars on his face are a different story.

Kakashi doesn't like to show his face, almost more touchy about it than anything else in his whole messy kit of emotional baggage. It's always nothing but a blase warning on the surface level, a blocked hand and light-hearted excuse, but it goes deep, deep down to unspoken rules of 'don't ever fucking ask' and 'never, never touch without permission ,' and perhaps even 'this is how I cope, this is how I live now because it is the only way I can'.

Genma follows the rules, but sometimes, even on the rare times when Kakashi bares his face to fill his mouth with Genma's cock, he wishes he didn't have to.

He brushes his fingers over an exposed cheek, and Kakashi flinches.

Kakashi used to say that he wasn't ashamed of his scars, his eye crinkling into a merry smile as he speaks while his students stare at his masked face appraisingly. People have all heard the rumors.

Genma catches sight of Kakashi's hands over his face in the bathroom mirror in the morning, sees the strained tilt to his shoulders, and he thinks to himself that sometimes Kakashi is a bad liar.

X

When they were quite small, Ino tied a ribbon around Sakura's ankle because she liked how the other little girl could sit and listen quietly to Ino talk about anything that struck her fancy for hours, and she liked how the rosy apples of Sakura's cheeks matched the roots of her hair, and Ino's mother had told her to be especially nice to the children who often got left out from the other kids games.

Ino still doesn't understand why Sakura ever let anyone bully her, but that is the difference between them.

Sometimes Ino thinks Sakura would have been the better Eros agent. No one can keep a cool head in a mission like Sakura can, come hell or highwater or a knife in the back.

Sakura is used to being patient, used to biding her time, settling down and hunkering in for the long wait.

But Ino, Ino lives like a fast-burning candlewick and always has, racing breathlessly after the end of her ribbon.

That's what made it hard, when Naruto died.

X

Kakashi had attended the funeral, although honestly Genma hadn't expected him too. Kakashi usually avoided funerals, as a rule. Genma remembers when Asuma died, Kakashi had been nowhere to be seen for about a week. Bloody inconsiderate.

But at Naruto's funeral, bigger than that blonde idiot had probably ever anticipated, Kakashi had stood tall in line beside Sakura and Sai, clothed all in black and pale as a sheet.

Genma, three rows behind and to the left, knew that stance, knew the way Kakashi's fists were ever-so-slightly shaking and his eyes were blankly staring. Kakashi felt responsible. Kakashi has always felt responsible for Sasuke.

(It's a problem that Genma feels, somewhere very dark and very hidden inside a cramped, sour part of his heart, that in some ways, Kakashi really is at least partly responsible for the last Uchiha, a problem he would never dare voice.)

Kakashi fucks him after the funeral, fucks him mean and deep into the night and into Genma's own curled up hurt that nestles under his breastbone like a piece of rotten fruit. Genma never was naive or kind enough to believe the kids proclamations of greatness, of saving his team and his village like some kind of damned savior, but it almost ached more because of that.

Another name on the hero's stone, another courageous light snuffed cleanly out, and just another day, another day, another day.

Genma doesn't know if Kakashi ever believed in Naruto, but he knows how the copy-nin feels about losing teammates, and that's enough, that's plenty enough for Genma to pretend not to notice when Kakashi's mask against Genma's back becomes damp with tears.

X

The thing that bothered Ino, that really bothered her, was that Sakura acted like Ino didn't care that Naruto was dead, that Naruto was dead and killed by the one person they really thought he'd actually be safe from.

Ino wished the Uchiha had never been born.

Sakura acted like no one understood, that no one else was suffering, and Ino knew it had to be worse than it was for her, knew she should be a better lover, a better friend about this, but it was hard, so hard.

Sakura acted like only her hero had died that day. Ino had her own boys, it was sure, but when Naruto's last funeral incense burned away, something hopeful and fluttering had been silenced for them all, forever.

Ino remembers Sakura on the day after the funeral, when Ino's hands were icily cold, and there was an unopened mission scroll with the Eros seal on her kitchen counter, waiting.

She'd thought to herself that perhaps this really was it; this was how all the light in the world guttered out.

She'd wanted to curl up in bed with the blankets over her head-smell the soapy cleanliness of Sakura's hair tickling her cheek and fall asleep until the world was over.

But Sakura perched quietly at her kitchen table, unwashed hair over her face, hands empty, listless and stretched over the greasy formica like an offering. When Ino, sitting across from her and choking on the silence in the air, tentatively curled her fingers through the limp ones on the table, Sakura turned her face away.

She stayed at the kitchen table for a long time.

ooo

_It's so lonely trying to be yours, _

_When we are looking for so much more_

_We are speaking in bodies here,_

_And this is what surviving looks like_

_My dear._

ooo

"Genma, I don't want you as my handler anymore."

Ino is sitting by the one tiny window of her room, hair damp from the shower. The patched lattice-screen was cracked open, and Ino's chest is bare and glowing in the faint light, her collarbones like moons, her breath a cloud in the crisp, chilly air.

Genma worried she would catch cold, sitting there in the night air. He lit a cigarette.

The new, untorn lingerie she bought two weeks ago is lying over the drying rack, silky and obsequious.

"Huh. That so?" He clicks his lighter closed with a firm, decisive movement. "It's a shame you're stuck with me, darlin'."

He offers her the cigarette.

Ino doesn't look at him. "I'm serious Genma. I've put in a request to headquarters for a new superior officer. I've filed an official report."

So, she'd gone right over his head. She could be so deliberately headstrong sometimes. It's really not good, for either of them.

Genma's fingers shake a little when he takes the next drag. The dimly lit, lithe shape of Ino under the window suddenly reminds him of the way Kakashi had looked before leaving on his numbingly long mission to Snow Country, all long and white and pale, with Genma's come still glistening on his stomach.

"Well...what the fuck Yamanaka."

It's a drawl, but one that comes out sharper than he intended, his control threatening to unravel like the end of a long, frayed rope.

Ino hardly twitches. She extends out one delicate hand for the cigarette.

Genma blows a stream of smoke into her face instead.

She heaves a sigh, looks out the window. Genma's fingers clench spastically for a moment, gathering himself.

"You're not watching out for yourself Yamanaka," Genma doesn't bother to drawl now, all the slow sway of his words clipped away like the stems of long-dead flowers.

"You're slipping and you know it."

"Give me the cigarette, Genma."

He gnashes his teeth, hands it to her distractedly. It would be too unacceptable not to; cigarettes are shared material between the two of them; like bedsheets, like skin, like scars.

Ino lets him try to pick up his pieces, smoking thoughtfully. There is something hazy in her mind, a sibilant something whispering that this is the only thing to do, the only thing left to do, the only thing that will make sense.

Genma is too close now, too close to her really. She wants him too much. She needs him too much. It's not good. Not good for business.

She thinks of the drug syndicate middle-man she had to fuck this morning who'd dug his nails into her back so deeply she can still feel the grooves he left on her skin burning faintly. He didn't seem like the type to wash his hands-there are probably fragments of her still caught under his dirty fingertips as she sits here now, hours later, skinned raw.

Ino can hardly hear Genma's lips moving.

She pictures her flesh flaking away in pinpointed clumps between her shoulder-blades, floating delicately out from under the hard, pink bridge of her client's thumbnail to drift to the ground in a parody of a dandelion's spores.

Part of her feels queasily victorious for that part of her which is no longer here, in this room, in this bed.

She is grossly cynical, in a detached way.

She should have charged him extra for the skin...

"Ino-Ino, wait-stop!" Genma's abruptly whip-crack sharp tone jolts her into the clarity of the here and now.

It's the same voice Genma always uses to run an immediate, hot shiver up her spine with it's raw agony, the same voice that clicks her jaw into place like a gridlock, because it means there will be pain coming now, there will be no forgiveness.

"W-What-?" She looks to see that Genma is suddenly kneeled in front her, one hand tight like a vice around her wrist, the other cupping the inner curve of her leg with a kind of strangled intimacy.

In Ino's loose fingers, the butt of the cigarette is pressed to her upper thigh, extinguished into her skin. A tendril of dying smoke wisps from the fading glow on it's end, and a faint, dull curl of pain shoots through her core.

Genma's fingers around her wrist are cruelly tight-just a second too late.

"Ah-shit!" she drops cigarette, bites her lip hard enough to bruise, as the burn on her thigh stings, reddens.

"God, Ino-fucking hell-" Genma movements are clipped and controlled, dropping her wrist like it's a useless toy and gripping her inner thigh more firmly. He pulls her wide and open like a parody of sexual aggressiveness that makes Ino's eyes abruptly unfocus, glaze over.

Genma snatches the messy first-aid kit from where it sits on a shelf above them, rips open a wad of bandages with his teeth.

It's funny, Ino can always tell that Genma is really angry about something when he starts to put things between his lips. He's like a wolf aching to teethe.

"This is the shit I'm talking about. You can't-" The antiseptic burns so cleanly she gasps, and Genma glances up at her open mouth, snarls viciously under his breath and pulls the thin cotton wrapping tighter around her leg.

"Who _exactly_ is going to make sure you don't fuck yourself over if I'm not here? Huh?"

He ties the knot of the bandage, still kneeling at her feet. His hand is trembling as he smooths his palm over the slightly pink splotch of blood through the binding, breathing short and hard.

He leans over her leg, kisses the creamy inside of her thigh so carefully and intensely an involuntary shudder rocks it's way up Ino's spine, from her toes to the tingling crown of her head.

Her eyes are glassy, staring over Genma's head as if her handler isn't even in her room, crouched between her legs like an offering, a lover, almost a supplication.

Genma's mouth closes carefully over a pale freckle tucked behind Ino's knee. his hands are still clutched around her thigh, unwavering.

"Sweetheart, what're you doin' to yourself." A quiet murmur, barely there, but she can feel it roll over her skin, goose-pimpled.

He is on an edge, she can feel it. She can feel that much.

Ino swallows hard, swallows again, swallows a third time. There's no water in her mouth, none at all, and perhaps that's only something that sharpens her just a little bit more, just enough.

"What have _you_ done to yourself, Genma."

X

Something hot lodges itself under Genma's tongue, plunges it's way in a searingly bright line down his throat and burns through his stomach-dirty and guilty and tangled up in heavy, singed knots.

Ino doesn't seem to notice that he's frozen in place, curled around her leg. She tilts her head at him.

"What I've done to myself has fuckin' nothing to do with it, Agent Yamanaka." Genma's whisper against her thigh is cool and brittle and such a lie he can feel it eating it's way through his teeth.

(Like those heavy scars eating their way through Kakashi's cheeks, lies like fine, tender tracings of a blade on Kakashi's lips-Genma has no fucking idea what a truth really looks like on someone's face)

Ino gazes blankly at him, her stare resolute in it's insanity, calm and collected in such a broken way, a doll in a china shop with a painted-on smile.

Genma feels the burning in his stomach, in his chest, and he wants to shake her until her teeth clatter, gather up all her broken pieces and meld them back together with brute force. He wants to peel her off the floor, set her up and wrench her back into position, until she works correctly, until she functions properly, until she's _fixed_.

But he can't really. Genman cannot lock Ino into place like a jigsaw puzzle, cannot soothe her, or even diminish her fear. Genma is no healer, no craftsman.

Genma is an Eros agent.

X

He grabs her arm, tosses her onto the mattress, flips her onto her stomach. His fingers are cruel on her thighs as he hikes her legs up, up, up, digging his nails in.

His motions are so fluid at first Ino barely registers the movement, but she does manage to notice, on a double-take, that he's snapped. It's so subtle, so careful.

It is so like Genma to crack minisculely, omnisciently, just another hairline fracture to add to his collection, but it's enough.

Ino knows him well enough by now to know that it's enough.

"Gen-!" She gasps raggedly, air sharp and cold in her numb lungs. She wasn't expecting this, and a small part of Genma feels vindicated by that, that she can still be surprised, shocked into action, as she mewls and pushes against him almost automatically.

"You're putting yourself in danger, _Agent_." His voice sneers over the title.

Genma fists a hand in all that cornsilk hair like he's demanding something, yanks her head back, feels a savage pleasure roll like a thunderclap up his spine when she moans, hot and lustful.

That's good. He wants her to want this, to feel this.

"You're putting this whole _fucking _mission in danger." His fingers are rough, and ache inside her in a disgustingly delicious way, sweet like the candy that rots your teeth. One, two, three.

She moves her hips like _that, _and it's beautiful, it's horrifying, Genma can hardly watch.

Ino is so far gone she doesn't know if she loves or hates him right now, with Genma curled over her, his unyielding chest pressed into her back like he wants to melt into her skin, his voice violent and bruising and his skin burning up for her, burning and burning and burning.

"Ff-fuck you." Ino spits the words between panting breaths. Her entire body is shaking. Genma isn't holding back, isn't even remotely holding back, something in him dark and snapped and dragging a bark of mocking laughter from his lips at her insult.

He licks a wide, messy stripe up the back of her neck, tightens the fist in her hair, spreads her wide open.

"God-Ino-look what I've done to you." His eyes roll back into his head. "I've done this to you."

In her ears, his laughter sounds hopeless.

He presses her quivering body into the mattress, not giving an inch. Genma knows better than to give anybody an inch, especially Ino, close as she is to a precipice all by herself.

He forged Ino in the same fire that brought him crashing to his knees, and it's an endless circle, a supernova eating itself right up.

Her mouth makes noises that are part encouragement, part pain, and there are blinding tear tracks flying down Genma's cheeks, wetness salty and sporadic on Ino's back, her hips and thighs. His lips over her skin are harsh and unrelenting and good, so good she trembles.

Ino wants to cry, but this time, there are no tears. This time her throat is raw and catches her moans like a net, strangles her into silence.

This time, Genma doesn't fuck like he's her handler, or her lover, or even her fucks like that dark, agonized part of himself that howls in the deadness of his dreams, that wanted to hold Kakashi's tortured, beautiful face into a fire when he said he was leaving for Snow Country, when he slapped Genma across the face and yelled himself hoarse.

The room is so quiet except for the two of them; their skin slapping, Genma's broken groans and heavy breathing, sobs catching in his throat between his movements.

The outside silence is heavy, milky, pressing in on Genma's ears as if dunked underwater and held there, kicking. It builds a pressure in the base of his skull, waterlogs his vision into cloudy half-shapes and indecipherable shadows.

The sound of Ino moaning, high and keen, filters dimly through Genma's consciousness as though from far away, very far, far away.

X

When it is over, the silence feels broken.

"This won't change my mind, Genma." Ino croaks the words, small and exhausted beneath him, her chest heaving for breath.

Genma is still shuddering, his arms quivering so badly he can't focus for very long, his nose pressed into her wild hair. He rolls so that he is curled around her, feeling the wetness on his cheeks and the back of his neck damp with sweat.

Ino barely moves.

Genma fights to breath normally, wraps himself as close around her as he can possibly manage, legs intertwined and arms tight around her torso. He mouths at her shoulder, the stark and jutting bone there.

She tastes of sweat and sex and bathwater starting to dry out, and he bites a ring of bruised-black imprints above her collarbone, hard enough to almost break skin.

Ino sighs softly, eyes fluttering shut..

Genma tries very hard to not think about the whys, and the reasons.

"...I know it won't."

ooo

End of Part Two

All feedback is greatly appreciated.  
The poem "It's so lonely..." can be creidted to Michelle K, a sublime artist on tumblr. (michellekpoems)

Part three is slowly being written, and I've been working a lot on "Brightness..." this past week, so there will probably be an update there soon as well! Hooray for actual progress on my multi-chapters. I'm so bad at keeping to a schedule it's amazing anything ever gets written! :)

Thank you for reading!  
-Lute


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